1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the emulation of circuits, and more specifically to tracking the states of signals in an emulated circuit.
2. Description of the Related Art
Emulators have been developed to assist circuit designers in designing and debugging highly complex integrated circuits. An emulator includes multiple reconfigurable components, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that together can imitate the operations of a design under test (DUT). By using an emulator to imitate the operations of a DUT, designers can verify that a DUT complies with various design requirements prior to a fabrication.
An aspect of emulation includes analyzing the power consumption of a DUT. Power analysis involves tracking the states of multiple signals in the DUT. For each signal that is tracked, an emulator typically has to implement numerous hardware resources (e.g., multiple registers or memories). Since billions of signals are typically tracked, a great amount of hardware resources have to be implemented by the emulator, which slows down the emulation process and limits the size of a DUT for which power analysis can be performed.
In addition, the tracking of signals in a DUT results in the emulator generating large amounts of data (e.g., multiple terabytes of data). The data is transferred to a host system for processing. However, transferring the data to the host system requires a large amount of bandwidth. Therefore, conventional power analysis in an emulation environment is inefficient in terms of hardware and communication resources.